How Microsoft Built, and Is Still Building, Windows 10 193
An anonymous reader writes with this Venturebeat story about how Windows 10 is different from previous versions because of the way it was designed, including 15 public preview builds, and how much work is still being done. Windows 10 for PCs arrived two weeks ago. Thankfully, we don't need to wait years to say this will be a Microsoft operating system release like no other. The most obvious clue is not the fact that Windows 10 was installed on more than 14 million devices in 24 hours, that you can get it for cheap or upgrade to it for free, nor even that it ships with a digital assistant and a proper browser. No, the big deal here is that Microsoft is turning its OS into a service, and that means as you read these words, it's still being built. For the next few years, we'll be getting not just Windows 10 updates and patches, but new improvments and features. This is possible because Microsoft built this version very differently from all its previous releases.
Did you get paid?` (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope you got money for running this advertisement, Slashdot.
Re:Did you get paid?` (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of course not, this is [linuxgazette.net], and it hasn't been updated in four years. I guess nothing of note has happened in the Linux world sine 2011.
Re:Did you get paid?` (Score:5, Informative)
Well no, it's called slashdot (/.) but you do know where that comes from right?
Well I do, but you might not - it was intended as a joke to make the site name hard to read out, i.e. h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slashdot-dot-org.
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Well no, it's called slashdot (/.) but you do know where that comes from right?
Well I do, but you might not - it was intended as a joke to make the site name hard to read out, i.e. h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slashdot-dot-org.
I think it would have been cleverer to call it DotSlash (./) with the slogan "You are here."
Re: Did you get paid?` (Score:2)
Yeah, suck it Windows for not using slashes or dots.
Re:Did you get paid?` (Score:4, Insightful)
As opposed to getting paid its users will soon be paying "very differently" than for previous versions of Windows(tm). They will be paying all the time.
RSAT (Score:2)
With all this building and rebulding and rebuilding the rebuilding, could Microsoft please fucking release a functional Windows 10 version of the RSAT tools?
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If this is an advertisement it fails pretty hard. "Still being built" sure doesn't instill me with the notion this operating system is ready for me to use yet. Think I'll just keep using what I have for another six months or so at least.
The big news... (Score:4, Insightful)
...is that all the reasons to choose Windows 10 over the competition, i.e. that it was a desktop operating system rather than a cloud service which required you to give not the slightest shit about your privacy (you did nothing of consequence) and a fast, always-on Internet connection (and you worked nowhere interesting), have gone.
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So it's kind of like a Google product, if Google made software in the 80's.
Re:The big news... (Score:5, Insightful)
This. Said before and will say again. MS is following the "let's kick our existing customers to the curb to pursue somebody else's business model" strategy.
When the whole Metro/8.0/Windows Store fiasco started, I said something like "If I wanted a Mac I'd already have one" and got modded into oblivion for it. It seems like Slashdot caught on though.
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Nor even (Score:4, Insightful)
That's it's privacy nightmare for those with the inclination to give a damn.
So, in other words, (Score:1, Informative)
since it's a service now we'll get to pay annually again and again instead of buying it once and having it 'til we're sick of it?
Re:So, in other words, (Score:4, Interesting)
How many times does it have to be repeated that are no annual fees for Windows 10?
SERVICE != SUBSCRIPTION
Examples:
Steam = Service
Salesforce = Subscription
Figure it out already and quit spouting the nonsense.
The reason for free Windows makes perfect sense. The cost of buying an upgrade has always made upgrades on existing hardware a very low number. So just give it away to end users since it doesn't make any money anyway. It's pretty well known 99% the of income for Windows comes from new PCs and enterprise agreements.
If they try to turn around and start charging annually for Windows after this, piracy will shoot through the roof and patching will go through the floor as people will hack to get it free and stop Windows Update so their hacks won't get blocked. (Remember the Windows Genuine Advantage garbage from XP, that was a lesson learned) This would result in 2 black eyes that Microsoft doesn't want and would lead to increases for Mac, Linux or other alternative. 1st is customer ill will over "pay us or your PC stops" and the 2nd is from getting a reputation about Windows being buggy exploit ridden as a result of people not patching and updating.
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Steam is a rather bad example considering that the main reason they give that client away is that is the vehicle to sell more software through it, and to give you the idea that it's easier and more convenient to buy your software through them than another venue.
Where's the benefit for Microsoft to give away a system they can as well sell? TANSTAAFL, sorry, and twice so when a corporation is involved. Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Well Microsoft have said explicitly that you won't, so no.
I think Microsoft is happy with the revenue from their "PC tax", the fact you'll have to buy a PC every few years to run modern applications should be enough to ensure they get roughly the same revenue from Windows as before. That said, they've also been giving Windows away for free on low cost devices lately, so they're obviously planning to tap into other revenue streams.
Subscriptions for operating systems though? Nah.
Microsoft has never given anything away for 'free'. The techies in the back room might come up with some really cool stuff, but the marketting wonks in the front office will override them. See Vista. The betas were chock full of cool stuff, like the first runs of the new replacement filesystem for NTFS. When deadline came, the marketting wonks declared the new fs wasn't ready for prime time and had the techies pull it and put NTFS back in. Every time they changed the specs, the techies had to revert and
Re:So, in other words, (Score:4, Interesting)
It's always been "a service" that's still being built. It's just that the rate of change was slower. If memory serves, NT4 only got good after Service Pack 4, XP after SP1 (or maybe 2), Windows Vista only got good when you upgraded it to Windows 7, and so it goes on. Windows 10 will stick around for a while, but in a year or two, they'll release a 'feature pack' or whatever they'll call it that'll get rolled into the initial install images and will make everything look and behave differently (but it'll still be Windows 10 - because this is the last windows ever - no, no need to worry about upgrades because it's all the same version, honestly).
The only new thing, as you say, is that we'll be pestered to upgrade windows 7/8 forever and we'll end up paying constantly for Windows 10.
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Wait till it goes to 11, man.
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Not yet.
Unless you want solitaire without the ads.
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You mean a Deck of Cards?
Free Microsoft advertisement... (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 10 isn't "built very differently" from Windows 8. Microsoft has always had the attitude of "F' it, ship it, we'll fix it on the road." -- Now it's just a "service" so they can proudly say it. Gheesh...
Even more pathetic than that (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFA:
That's right, it's a new feature that Microsoft is able to offer a specific group of people a given set of builds. You know, what all the Unix distributions we know have been able to do since time immemorial? You can even create your own builds. Just create a new repo and add it onto the end of the list, with newer versions of packages. Done! Microsoft physically couldn't do that until right now? That's pathetic, just like the rest of their package management functionality.
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Also, don't forget that the 'in-place upgrade' entails downloading the entire new build and installing it, which is a far cry from upgrading just the changed components. Even the remarkably slow "We're setting up things for you" after logging in happened for every build.
I had to remove the 'old windows version' and 'temporary install files' on my 60GB SSD convertible every time I installed a new build, as they sucked up a good 9GB of precious disk space.
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Christ. You're the second kid that is incapable of anything but retarded schoolyard replies I've encountered on Slashdot this week. I know it's a free internet and everything, but please grow the fuck up before you speak here.
P.S. If you are actually mentally retarded, I am deeply sorry. I have wish your kind no harm or insult.
Re:Even more pathetic than that (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet after all this time I still can't install/upgrade Windows directly to an external drive. I run it on a 2013 Mac Pro (yeah yeah Apple, trash can, whatever you want to get out of your system) on a ssd via thunderbolt. Every time I try to install or upgrade to the drive the windows installer insists that the volume won't be bootable and thus won't install. You have to perform the upgrade on the internal drive (which means for an upgrade, cloning the ssd back to the internal) then clone it to the external to boot. Which boots fine, by the way. Oh yeah, and if there are any other external drives plugged in, they have to be removed or the installer fails, which is annoying when the external drive is daisy-chained off another.
Linux can directly install/upgrade to any drive on any bus. As can OSX. Why can't Windows do this after all this time?
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Linux can directly install/upgrade to any drive on any bus.
Not only that, but copying your Linux install to another volume and making it bootable is trivial and you can do the whole process without any reboots, except when you reboot into the copy and actually use it. With Windows you usually have to do a bunch of stuff, reboot into recovery mode, do some more stuff, and then reboot.
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Yep, and the same with OSX. Cloning bootable volumes to other drives is simple and can be done either with included command line tools or free gui apps. Backups bootable from any bus (thunderbolt, firewire, esata, usb2/3) made extremely easy.
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Thats a pretty big deal when your on the hook for actually supporting what you release - at that volume - and maintaining compatibility.
I was working at Adobe ages ago on testing Vista and they let us know the app compatibility toolkit shims (which you can google - its a rather fascinating framework) they were putting in for Acrobat Reader 3 and 4 - to work around a window sizing issue. Reader 3 originally ran on Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 and Reader 4 was really only intended for 95/98/NT/2000 - but both p
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Go read, SHILL
Re:Even more pathetic than that (Score:4, Informative)
Really? Linux can do this? Right. So here we have Mr. Linux and he can setup groups and all of a sudden the "freetard" ring gets one build and the "It's GNU/Linux damn it" ring gets a different build, and the "I still want to run the 2.3 kernel" ring gets an older build? No, Linux CAN'T do that. In fact, Linux is decentralized and is made up of distros and forks and all and has no central control. It is ridiculous to claim that Linux can do this.
No, Mr. Linux (AKA Linus Torvalds) doesn't set up the groups. He is interested in just kernel stuff. Also, it is because of the decentralized nature that allows Linux the flexibility to do this for over a DECADE before windows finally caught up.
Mr. Debian, Miss Ubuntu, Mrs. Fedora, Mr. Arch, and Mr. Gentoo make their respective groups. They set up the rings of development.
For example, Mr. Debian has Unstable, Testing, and Stable rings for his development systems. He also runs security updates for his previous Stable platform for at least a year. He is slow and methodical, but he has some of the most stable systems in the world
Miss Ubuntu likes Mr. Debian's ideas but thinks they are too slow and just repackages and improves on the Unstable and testing branches with some of her own packages and repositories for flair. But she also realizes the need for a long support build to go with her rapidly evolving six-month builds.
Mrs. Fedora helps out her husband Red Hat by releasing test builds of the latest and greatest stuff. She packages up a build every 6 months and supports it for a year. She only supports the last two builds and will not support a long term release... her husband will do that for her with his product.
Mr. Arch and Mr. Gentoo have a different approach. They run with the latest and greatest all the time and it is up to the individual users to know when to update their components.
Re:Even more pathetic than that (Score:5, Informative)
Really? Linux can do this?
Yes, any asshole can do it at home.
So here we have Mr. Linux and he can setup groups and all of a sudden the "freetard" ring gets one build and the "It's GNU/Linux damn it" ring gets a different build, and the "I still want to run the 2.3 kernel" ring gets an older build? No, Linux CAN'T do that.
Who told you that? Of course it can. I can do it right here at home without even needing a distribution to do it for me. I make my own packages, using the same tools the distribution maintainers use. I put them in a directory, or in a web-accessible directory on another host, and add one line to sources.list or one one-line file (maybe two lines, comments are good) to /etc/sources.list.d/ and bango, I get debian twiddled with my own packages.
It is ridiculous to claim that Linux can do this.
Unless, of course, you have any experience with Linux. Then you've probably done it yourself, and you know how easy it is to do.
You can do the same thing trivially with gentoo with overlays. You create your own tree, overlay it onto the official tree, and bango. You get whatever you put into your tree. I presume you can do the same with rpm-based distributions, but I hates them my precious, so I use something else.
If only you knew anything about Linux or Unix, you might have something useful to add here.
Re:Free Microsoft advertisement... (Score:5, Insightful)
No software is EVER bug-free (own an Android phone? Enjoying all that perfection?); OSes are complex environments, and sometimes you just can not get every feature in place in a reasonable amount of time. At some point, you have to declare that you've reached a close of a phase of development. Despite our glee at the old "nah, that's a feature" joke, I don't think anyone honestly believes a company with as much money at stake as MS has really has a "screw it" attitude. They're a HUGE company, and for anyone who's ever worked in that sort of environment, you know that you actually have to marvel that any product at all EVER ships.
In part, it is because no OS is ever perfect (you Mac users take a look back, and you'll remember how bad the OS really was years ago, and admit that it too has its own unique problems even today despite being dramatically improved) that MS has moved to this model - fixes to issues can hopefully happen more quickly, new features added sooner.
Along with this new model of publishing Windows comes something else (relatively) new for MS - a new monetization method. For all the grousing about how old and lame the Redmond folks are, now that they are embracing the "freemium" model used by many mobile apps (ads for the free version, or pay to remove them) there's all the complaints for moving to the "new school" way of business. The second - and a little more understandable but I think still defensible in today's environment - complaint is privacy (mainly, the sale of your habits to merchants). First, while not easy for the newbie to do, 10 can be locked down fairly well (PC Mag has a decent article, and it's not the only one) [pcmag.com]; second, if you use Facebook, Twitter, or other social platform, or any search engine, you began giving up privacy the moment your fingers touched a keyboard. If your activities are highly illegal (not just minor film/music torrenting) and you haven't been caught, you're already not worried about this issue; for the average person, yes we don't like the idea of targeted ads and trending our preferences, but to say that there's a person sitting around looking at that data and saying, "Aha! Bob Smith, I *knew* you were into midget clown rodeos!" - well, that's just silly. The only privacy I really, honestly care about is banking, taxes, and when I watch porn - my wife is cool with that last part, but I don't want my kids to type something in only to have YouPorn instead of YouTube pop up. Local browsing, then, is still hidden from other "common" users on my machine, and if I choose to do things like bank on line, I simply have to hope and trust that the certs on the HTTPS connection the bank provides haven't been compromised. That's going to be true for any platform I use to do these things.
I applaud MS for attempting to move in a new direction - it shows, finally, a willingness to change, even if there are missteps along the way. They will have issues with Windows, just as all other OSes do. They will piss people off from time to time. But to complain because they don't do something, then complain because they do? That's not proper criticism, it's just bias.
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Except for all the spying added...
And the fact that you aren't allowed to use it how you want...
And the loss of functionality...
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And *allegedly* even if you find/turn off the all of the "spy-ware", It *still* forwards your shit to Microsoft.. THAT, friends, is *precisely* what your garden-variety malware does.. I have a strong feeling that as time goes on and more people become aware of just how invasive Windows 10 is, they're gonna revolt.. I'm a retired Windows/Linux admin, cleaned up behind Windows since 1991 and Windows 3.11. Once I retired, I decided that I'd had enough of MS and moved all my home systems to Linux. I'm sort of t
How Microsoft Built ... Windows 10 (Score:5, Funny)
make; make install?
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Datamining (Score:3)
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No, but you have more options to turn it off.
You'll probably want to peruse the firewall rules after you are done turning off the dozen or so switches in the privacy settings screen and once you've combed through the gp settings.
I solved the data mining issues by staying with Win 7. It is more than adequate for doing the things that I need Windows for.
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No, but you have more options to turn it off.
You'll probably want to peruse the firewall rules after you are done turning off the dozen or so switches in the privacy settings screen and once you've combed through the gp settings.
I solved the data mining issues by staying with Win 7. It is more than adequate for doing the things that I need Windows for.
Only thing I use Windows for these days is Kindle for PC. And once I figure out where they stash the serial number for it, I'll probably stop even using my XP under Virtualbox. See, I get a lotta books off Amazon, but I don't use a real live Kindle here, I pull the books down with Kindle for PC, run them through Calibre, and load them on my 'Ebay special' Aluratek reader. Some of those I gotta strip the DRM from in Calibre, and that takes the K4PC serial number.
Re:Datamining (Score:5, Informative)
Other data (such as stack traces from crash reports) are often sent to the 3rd party developers in an attempt to identify the underlying cause of the crash and fixed it if it is the result of a software bug.
Enterprise users can disable the reporting entirely via group policy or have the reports forwarded to their own internal server for private use. It is only the home editions that can't completely disable the crash reporting and telemetry features.
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Funny. The only time you actually *WANT* Microsoft to receive your data is from crash reports, and then they don't actually do anything about the crash.
Ah, I remember the days before I turned off that crap, when a crash would result in the hard drive thrashing for two minutes creating a 'crash report'. Which is exactly what I wanted to happen when something crashed while I was in the middle of doing some work, preventing me from restarting the app to go back to what I was doing before the freaking thing crashed.
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Big news - learned from mistakes! (Score:3)
I for one am very happy that the Win8 Metro shit is dead and buried, as well as the other things that we were told more than ten years ago "are already in Longhorn", but now are real instead of hype trying to one-up Apple.
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Why do you hate desktop users so much MS?
No, it has turned it into a SPYWARE, not a service (Score:1, Informative)
The content of your emails, your voice, your browsing history, everything you do with your PC is uploaded to Microsoft (and a copy goes to NSA too, of course). Every antivirus software would label Windows 10 as a spyware if it weren't made by Microsoft. And no, you cannot turn it off completely, Microsoft's bad faith is proven by the fact that the default settings are all anti-privacy, not to mention that you cannot be sure that a closed-source OS does what it says:
http://arstechnica.com/informa... [arstechnica.com]
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With 8 they stoppped making an OS for the users and started making one only for their interests
I don't think that means what you think it means (Score:1)
Microsoft is turning its OS into a service, and that means as you read these words, it's still being built.
No, it means that Windows 10 is banana-ware: Not ripe at time of purchase.
TAILS Linux 1.5 is out (Aug 11, 2015) (Score:1, Funny)
# Tails is a live system that aims to preserve your privacy and anonymity.
It helps you to use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship almost
anywhere you go and on any computer but leaving no trace unless you ask it to
explicitly.
# It is a complete operating system designed to be used from a DVD, USB stick, or SD
card independently of the computer's original operating system. It is Free Software
and based on Debian GNU/Linux.
# Tails comes with several built-in applications pre-configured with securit
DRM and Other Garbage (Score:1)
Just can't stand Microsoft anymore... they are not developer focused anymore.
They really began to annoy me with DRM, and the force feeding of Metro Dung in 8 and the worlds most annoying start menu in 10.
Windows is not a tight environment either (like Mint 17.x) where you have full control on what runs on your PC... too much background activity in Windows. Probably data mining all our personal information for their marketing department.
In fact they are so annoying, even free isn't tempting anymore - Linux M
It kinda sounds like (Score:2, Insightful)
I love the virtual desktop feature - Didn't Linux have that like 20 yrs ago? Hmmmmm
Hope there aren't any open source patent violations!
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OK, I'm all up for a little Microsoft bashing where appropriate.
But Microsoft had virtual desktops back in the XP days. It was a power tools download you had to get yourself, but it did in fact exist.
And, yes, those of us who have been using virtual desktops for a long time can't see why we'd ever do without them.
The sheeples' choice? (Score:4, Insightful)
For various reasons, I run multiple OS's. I was part of the recent wave of upgrades to WIN-10 because I have to anticipate what my accounting clients are going to run into when they upgrade which they tend to do without warning.
I personally think MS is just assuming that people will run through the process without thinking much about privacy settings and security issues on the other side. I'm a wee bit OCD about that, but the public I try to work with isn't even when they're told to be careful. I'm still baffled by the number of systems I deal with that have either no antivirus or outdated versions, no firewall, etc. Let's face it, if MS gains marketing data in exchange for a "free" upgrade, most folks won't complain. What I'm also concerned about from a practical manner is the fact that various support builds are going to be pushed though without the option of deciding when to install meaning that various drivers that worked earlier are suddenly off in the ozone upon restart.
There is also the matter of when, where, and how MS will acknowledge problems with the OS. For example, the Edge browser seems to have some real issues integrating with printing which simply aren't there when you switch back to IE-11 which fortunately hasn't been removed (yet), but only disappears from view.
MS's view of the future which they've been fairly clear about is a device-spanning OS that they're going to drive and I think that's one of the main things to keep in mind with WIN-10.
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Fixed it for you (Score:1)
No, the big deal here is that Microsoft is turning its OS into a service, and that means as you read these words, it's still being built. For the next few years, we'll be getting ^H^H^H^H^H^H paying for not just ^H^H^H^H Windows 10 updates and patches, but^H^H^H whether or not there are new improvments and features. This is possible because Microsoft built this version very differently from all its previous releases.
Of course it is a big deal. Once you see what is going to happen.
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No more the farce of forcing users to run on the upgrade treadmill. Just keep handing over the money.
Yeah most buggy with no qa team (Score:2)
WindowsME didn't have any of the problems I had with 10. All agile and always changing with privacy nightmares. Great corporate OS who like things never to change and pesky updates adding elements of uncertainty. Different alright to irrelevent.
At least there's an LTSB option... (Score:2)
I'm just glad they didn't totally abandon business customers. Running a constantly-changing OS is fine for a home machine that browses the web, makes Skype calls, and watches movies. It's even tolerable in some office situations where all the person is doing is Office documents with no systems interaction beyond email. When you build a software component on top of an OS, however, and come to rely on things working a certain way, that's where the Agile thing breaks down.
The company I work for sells a suite o
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'...a suite of middleware that relies heavily on some of the internals of Windows. Changing out anything is a risk that the product doesn't work as expected. '
You need to FIX that. ITSec researchers are seeing more and more threats going forwards. Any product that locks an end user to a specific configuration with no updates allowed is a security nightmare waiting to happen.
Devs have to accept and adjust to a world where every library and tool (Java, Oracle, Adobe, M$, etc.) is going to be updated at short
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If they can provide me with an OS that boots consistently...
What in their long history of OS's leads you to believe this one is different from all its predecessors?
How much did MS pay for this bit of astroturfing, or are you an MS intern, not getting paid at all?
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Yes, since Windows 7, Windows has been a pretty fine operating system. This coming from a VERY long time Linux guy (1995/Slackware). I supported Windows 3.11 thru XP, till I retired in 2010, and at that time, my home systems were on Windows 7, but I decided I was tired of MS and moved all my systems to Linux (KUbuntu, thank you very much). When 10 started with the previews I decided to try it out in a virtual machine, but now thats it released, and all the "spy-ware" thats being found embedded in it, I'm no
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I at least gave it a fair shake. I used it for about 28 days on my main computer just to give myself a chance to get used to it, just like I always try to do with a new OS. 29th day, Back to Windows 7 for me on this laptop. The macbook will stay with Mint for the foreseeable future.
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Oh just fuck off with this OMG M$ $HILL!!!11 bullshit. I haven't had problems with Windows booting for over a decade. Small sample set yes, but it's entirely feasible.
Not since Millenium, eh?
Re:Long time *NIXer considering switching to Windo (Score:4, Informative)
>>...and I knew I could trust them.
This part is especially funny, in light of the recent Ars Technica article about how Win10 continues to send stuff to MS, even after you tell it *not* to.
Trust, it's a two way street...
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yup... MS has shot themselves in the foot with this one.. If a technical user wants to turn off all of the privacy-destroying crap, then MS has ZERO business ignoring said users wishes.. This had to be said ...... FUCK YOU MS!!!
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The enterprise is going to be interesting with this stuff. If MS sends PII from Windows 10 to Microsoft, and an enterprise in the USA or Europe "upgrades" to Windows 10, then how can that enterprise continue to claim "Safe Harbor" certification?
I suspect that Microsoft is going to have to rip out all the privacy-destroying stuff before it can sell to a company that needs to be "Safe Harbor" certified.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I guess they will have a clean, no data spying, enterprise version, and a consumer version which is the current Windows 10.
I expect the enterprise version will have one king hell hefty pricetag. I also expect all the data collected by the consumer version to be mined, resold, remined, resold again, repackaged, once more resold, ad nauseum. MS is going to have to make up for that revenue stream somehow or the stockholders will shitcan the front office fucks and install a new set that will. 'Free upgrade'? From Microsoft?
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I sure hope so. I've always been a big Microsoft fan, .NET developer, Apple hater. But I upgrade my laptop from Win7 to Win10, then saw all the privacy invading stuff set by default, and converted back to Win7. Very disappointed in the current direction of Microsoft.
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I used to like Debian, but sine switching to systemd with Debian 8, I've had all sorts of problems with it, and I've wasted too much of my time trying to debug stupid boot/init issues that just shouldn't happen in a stable release of any distro. ... I don't like to admit it, but Windows has come a long way. If they can provide me with an OS that boots consistently, ...
Are you really sure you want to exult Windows 10 because its booting "just works" when not even three days ago we had a story about a Windows 10 update (which cannot be turned off in Home edition, btw) that caused an unstoppable reboot cycle? http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
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It stops and just does not install the update. It goes through a few boot cycles first to try to install it. It is not unstoppable nor does it render the computer useless or anything. I am not even a regular Windows user and I know this.
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Subtle trolling takes too much thought - we hire out to foreigners who speak the language well enough to recognize patterns and send out the appropriate canned troll/astroturf message.
Did I just share a company secret?
Re:The quality of trolling on here... (Score:4, Insightful)
..has really done down. These guys might as well hang a flashing neon TROLL or SHILL sign above their posts nowadays its so obvious. Whatever happened to the subtle trolls (yes they did exist) that had - on the surface at least - had very convincing arguments?
Perhaps they weren't trolls at all, and simply had different opinions than you do. They were subtle and had convincing arguments, yet in your mind they were all definitely trolls. Why is that?
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"They were subtle and had convincing arguments, yet in your mind they were all definitely trolls. Why is that?"
How about first you explain why so many people are fond of straw men.
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"They were subtle and had convincing arguments, yet in your mind they were all definitely trolls. Why is that?"
How about first you explain why so many people are fond of straw men.
GP stated "Whatever happened to the subtle trolls (yes they did exist)..," showing (s)he does in fact believe they were trolls, and then gave two pieces of evidence which I claim shows they weren't trolls at all. Please explain where you see a straw man in this argument.
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"Please explain where you see a straw man in this argument. "
Go look up "straw man" then maybe you'll get a clue.
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You need to stop telling others what to do and start explaining your own arguments in your own words. As we've asked you repeatedly to do.
So far all we have is you claiming that all those people were sublte trolls and then running away from your own claims like poor and less skilled version of Donald Trump.
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GP is not required to explain others' reasons for doing what they do. I suspect he was motivated by the fact that you wrote "Whatever happened to the subtle trolls (yes they did exist) that had - on the surface at least - had very convincing arguments."
A strawman argument [wikipedia.org] requires that the person responding changes the proposition and then refutes the changed proposition rather than the addressing the actual point of argument. GP neither
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"A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument which was not advanced by that opponent."
So genius, which bit of:
"yet in your mind they were all definitely trolls. Why is that?"
isn't a straw man to you?
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All of it. Because I am literate. Let me illustrate:
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Nice try, quite amusing really. All bullshit however.
"There is no strawman because you yourself set up the category, and he's merely questioning your ability to accurately apply use it without being overinclusive."
He's not questioning it, he's putting forward a false postulation which he's then using to as a point of argument.
Now go learn english.
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Back at ya, unsubtle troll.
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Are you truly this stupid??
"yet in your mind they were all definitely trolls"
Is a blatant lie and a straw man he's attempting to set up. Got it? Or do you need it written out it crayon with explanatory notes?
You brainless cretin.
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[System alert: keywords detected]
You want to buy a boy? You sick bastard!
Re:Slashdotter Template (Score:4, Insightful)
No. People criticise microsoft because Windows 10 is disappointing and they seemed to have chucked privacy out the window. MS reached their peak with Windows 7 - a good OS most people would agree - and MS itself seemed to be changing and focusing more on customers than just on their bottom line. Yeah well, more fool us on that latter point.
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I dissent. Win 7 is really annoying and lots of things that worked well in XP don't work in 7. E.g. the file search capability is almost totally useless. I would still be using XP, if it were not for the end of life issues, created by third parties who stopped supporting it.
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Nope, not disappointing. You can turn any of the 'new' privacy-invading features off. Like you have to do when you install Ubuntu and disable all the Amazon search integration shit.
How is that different?
Because with Windows 10 as a "service" they can choose to remove that ability at any time?
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You can't turn all of them off. Even turning cortana off still results in your computer contacting MS's servers. You can't use a proxy to get around it either, several programs bypass your proxy. You can't use hosts file either, many dlls have built in IP addresses. The only way to keep 10 from contacting MS is to have your external firewall block it from those addresses.
Also, this Ars article is everything /. wishes it still was: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-told-not-to-w
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There are several highly technical studies done of what Windows 10 does even after you've disabled all of the crap... Keylogger still sends your keystrokes to MS, if you have a webcam it sends video to MS, if you have a microphone it sends voice data to MS... EVEN AFTER YOU SUPPOSEDLY DISABLED these "features"... If this doesn't bother you, well. I don't know what to tell you... It sure the FUCK bothers me, and only reinforces my choice back in 2011 to switch all of my systems over to Linux....
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The Ubuntu/Amazon thing you allude to is ONE LITTLE thing that is trivially easy to turn off, and once you're turned it off, it STAYS OFF..
The MS/Windows 10 thing is multiple keyloggers/uploads of any video from a webcam/uploads of voice data from your microphone, and this continues to happen EVEN WHEN YOU TURN THESE FEATURES OFF....
If you can't see the difference, you're braindead...
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Nope, not disappointing. You can turn any of the 'new' privacy-invading features off. Like you have to do when you install Ubuntu and disable all the Amazon search integration shit.
How is that different?
It's really bad that one has to explicitly turn off things. At any point Microsoft can introduce a new evil feature and the user must be knowledgeable enough to go turn it off, or else he is screwed.
No. All datamining should be only enabled with my consent. In other words, it should be a whitelist, not a blacklist. I don't want to be turning knobs and plugging holes all the time.
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Its been almost a month now since I got 10 on this 8 computer. I have a 7 computer and it would not even attempt to get 10 until a couple of days ago. It still fails on every attempt to download 10. I have a vista computer and I am grateful that they will not allow me to upgrade it to 10. I used to use real player to download video off the internet. Ever since I installed 10, I get the message that there is no video on this page even though I am watching it play. My internet speed is suppose to be ar
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Okay, do this experiment. Install a Linux distro on any PC. From the very beginning, keep a notebook on every little glitch you meet over the months. Anything that you have to manually hack together, every bug report that you have to send, and every weird error message that occurs. You'd be surprised.
Look, I don't care a dime about the repetitious Secure Boot rants. They are a secondary issue. I first want proper QA on the Linux desktop.